Macao Village, Dominican Republic
A skinny kid with a YSL belt holding up the trousers of his funeral suit played a bamboo trumpet. It wailed above the revving scooters and pounding drums. The sun flashed on his belt buckle. His eyes were too big for his head.
Spirits didn’t mind the heat, thought Joubert, gripping the sweaty hand of his wife and trying not to outstep her in his ill-fitting shoes. The funeral procession threaded past a broken cement wall along the rock-strewn road in the baking sun, towards the crematorium a block from the car wash. A flaking billboard declared ‘Texaco for life’ and featured a smiling white man and a Toyota. The motley crowd kicked up a dust that caked the nostrils and smelled of gasoline, while the sun glared down producing a hostile, arid heat that parched throats and minds. They sang all the same.
Music filled the air—a band played a rara parade with drums that beat a tattoo to the rhythm of a pulse inside Joubert’s head. Behind them the tourist SUVs and saloons backed up, bouncing over the speed ramps. A bony bitch with teats like buttons trotted beside them barking at the drummers, and an old man sat on his step and waved at the children in their oversized formal clothes. Fotina might have been one of those children if she had lived.
The coffin was small, glossy and white and had cost more than a month’s takings in Joubert’s beach restaurant. He couldn’t see why it cost so much, but Fotina was his only daughter and this would be her only funeral. He oozed sweat in the black jacket borrowed from his brother, a waiter at the Paradise Club. The sleeves were an inch too short.
The banzas twanged as the band struck up ‘Pran Kwa Mwen’ (Take Care of Me) in Haitian Creole and everyone knew the words, which rose defiantly in a wave of timbres, especially: ‘Nou tout se moun sou late e’ (we are all people on the sidelines). Some women moved their hips and clapped. ‘Iye, iye, iye,’ they cried. Tambourines jangled like loose change.
Joubert kicked a discarded plastic bottle that went scuttling to the kerb between the legs of the mourners. His wife shot him an angry look, the grief carved in the lines on her face. Only the little people were on the sidelines, reflected Joubert. The big people drove SUVs and dumped seaweed from their flashy beach resorts to rot where it poisoned the people on the sidelines. It was tourism that killed Fotina. And Joubert brushed away the first and the last tear of the day.
‘Take care of me,’ sang the mourners.
